Save your dough

For all you aspiring pizzaioli, let’s get one thing out of the way right now. Try as you might, you’re going to have a tough time replicating the pies produced by your favorite pizza-maker.

But you can come pretty darn close.

While the standard home oven can’t hold a flame to the high radiant heat of the professional brick or wood-burning variety, by following some basic dough-making principles, you can create a flavorful pizza with a stellar crust that will likely save you some trips to the local pizzeria.

As popular as pizza has always been, its standing in the culinary community seems to rise with each passing year, as restaurateurs, from Wolfgang Puck to Mario Batali, stake their reputations — and their enterprises — on their signature pizzas.

Even local restaurateur Tracy Borkum is banking on gourmet pizza to bolster her recent transformation of the former Laurel restaurant into a casual Italian-American eatery, Cucina Urbana.

With pizza’s growing esteem has come a budding passion among home cooks for reproducing the pies they’ve come to crave when eating out.

While there seems to be no limit to the kinds of toppings that can adorn a pizza these days, it is ultimately the crust, thin or otherwise, that separates the sublime from the simply ordinary, most pizza experts would agree.

“To me, the topping is almost a bonus,” says master breadmaker Peter Reinhart, author of “American Pie, My Search for the Perfect Pizza.” “My definition of a pizza is dough with something on top of it.”

Most pizza dough recipes are simply a variation on a few basic ingredients: flour, yeast, water, sugar, salt and sometimes oil, the combinations of which yield different results depending on the type of crust you favor.

For instance, sugar not only helps hasten the activation of the yeast, but also lends a caramelized color to the crust, while oil produces a softer, more pliable dough and a more tender crust.

Pizza makers have varying opinions on what kind of flour to use and how much gluten it should have, but most agree it should be unbleached. According to Reinhart, unbleached is preferable because it still has beta-carotene pigments, which he says give the dough a better flavor and aroma.

Two of Reinhart’s key tips are to bake the pizza at the highest temperature possible as quickly as is feasible and to take time in fermenting the dough, preferably overnight. His target baking time is no longer than seven minutes, although that probably is not long enough for many home ovens.

“The challenge of making a good pizza at home is we don’t have a true, authentic pizza oven that will bake at 600, 650 degrees or higher, and our home ovens won’t go higher than 550,” explained Reinhart, an instructor in the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N. C.

“Pizza crust is relatively thin, so you want the outside crispy before the inside dries out. That’s why a hot oven is so valuable. A common mistake a home pizza maker makes is to bake it at too low a temperature and by the time it appears done, the crust is really more like cardboard.”